Man, this hits home. It's always the cheap stuff that gets us, isn't it? Like my buddy who spent two winters with a towel shoved under his front door because he was sure he needed a whole new door, when really it was a $4 strip of weather seal. Same deal with my laptop that ran slow for a year and I'm out here researching new ones, then my brother clears out 40 gigs of junk in ten minutes and it runs like new. We convince ourselves the fix has to be big and pricey, so we avoid it, and the small annoying thing turns into a big annoying thing. Funny how the brain works that way.

Kept your coal pile for a reason or what? Because I did the same swap and mine sat there for a year before I finally gave it away to a kid just starting out. What gets me is you said 8 months and that sulfur thing hit home, I was always fighting that orange flaking on my welds before. So here's my real question... do you find yourself missing the slow fire, like the way coal lets you walk away for a minute and come back to a banked heat? Propane shuts off and it's just done, and that part threw me more than the smoke ever did.